The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to network communication and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to methods and systems of managing communication among a plurality of nodes in a network.
Social networks have recently become a prominent internet application. Networks such as Facebook™, MySpace™ and Twitter™ have gained enormous popularity. Social networks constantly continue to grow in terms users, connections, features and proliferation to new target audiences.
The popularity of social networks and their richness of features brought enormous amounts of data into the networks. The Claremont Report on Database Research, R. Agrawal et. al. The Claremont Report on Database Research. Berkeley, Calif., 200, which is incorporated herein by reference, points out social networks as an important example of the trend of ‘Big Data’. According to this report, this trend will undoubtedly ‘shake up’ the data management field.
Some developments have made to turn social networks into an automated platform. One example for automation is the Facebook Query Language, which is a simple query language with which users query their own and their immediate friends' data, see Facebook Query Language. http://developers.facebook.com, 2009. Another query language, presented in R. Ronen, O. Shmueli. SoQL: A Language for Querying and Creating Data in Social Networks. ICDE Workshops, 2009, which is incorporated herein by reference, is a more expressive query language for social networks which uses path and group as data types. A model in which users use conjunctive queries in order to automatically add friends to their friends list, is proposed in R. Ronen, O. Shmueli. Evaluating Very Large Datalog Queries on Social Networks, published in EDBT 2009, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Another example for automation features involving intelligent communication between participants are a Facebook application, called ‘Events’, facilitates the organization of an event. The application automates invitation sending to friends, and collects ‘attending’, ‘not attending’ and ‘may be attending’ responses. Responses are visible to responders' friends. This is in fact a preliminary example for a protocol with structured communication, which runs on top of a social network.